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134 PART 11. THE ART from which no individual or group act of resistance could arise. . ... [The concentration camp] was a final apothcosis of the mass state, composed of few depersonalized managers and millions of dehurnanized slaves, all under thrall to one charismatic leader, the only person; the only one truly Like these prisoners, Winston must face the problem of individual He docs not attempt to alive. >2 existence in the literal, not the philosophical, sense. define existence, bur to discover hor. to exist. The paradox of totalitarian- ism is that it intensifes individual loneliness and at the same time binds all the isolated figures into one overpowering system. The dominant emphasis throughout OrwellPs work is on loneliness and exclusion, on the fearínl individual in an oppressed world, on the people, in Trotsky's phrase, *swept into the dust bin of history.” Winston Smirh, the final embodimenr of defeated man, has predecessars in all of Orwells books: in his impoverished and exploited persona in Paris, London, Wigan and Spain; in Flory, Dorothy Hare, Gordon Comstock, George Rowling and Boxer, Each character attempts, in Chekhov's description of himself as a young man, “to squeeze the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and wake one beautiful morning to feel that he has no longer a slave's blood in his veins but a real man's."% And each character stenggles against the bondage of their threatening world toward individual freedom and responsibility Like the novels of Malraux, Sartre and Camus, Nineteen Eighty-Donr expresses our archetypal fears ofisolation and disintegration, bestiality, cru- elty and dehumanization. Orwell's response to the horrors of contemporary history emphasizes his close relationship to these authors and firmly places him in the tradition described by Victor Brombert: “Europe's dark hours are thus responsible for the emergence of a generation that feels “situeó” and responsible in the face of history—a generation whipped on by the urge to transmute ¡ts anguish into action. . . . Sartre has shown how the awareness of death, the threatened subjection to torture and the systematic will to degrade brought writers to the exlreme frontiers of the human condition m3L and inspired them with a... concern for moral issues. repetition of obsessive ideas is an apocalyptic lamentation lor Lhe fate of man in the age of anxicty. His expression of the political experience of an entire generarion gives Niñeteen Eighty-Fowr a voritably mythic power and makes it one of the most influential books of the modern period, even for those who have never read it. As Harold Rosenberg states, “The tone of Orwell the postwar imagination was ser by Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Fonr: since the appearance of that work, [the theme of] the *dehumanized collective? haunts our thoughts." Orwell's particular and distinct contribution to modern English lirerarure is a passionate commitment, a radical sincerity and an ethic of responsibility that ultimately rranscends his defeated heroes. FOURTEEN NINETEEN ElGHTY-FOUR A Novel of the 19308 This essay was first read at a conference on Ornell's Nineteen Fighty- Four at the Library of Congress in Washington in 1984. It i005 tben published in a book tbat also included heavy bitters like Alfred Kazin and Denis Donogbue. 1 trote that Orwell's statements about the future were not prophecies, but descriptions of the past, Though he failed to predict many events, be was impressively accitrate about the emergence of three hostile superstates engaged in permanent but in- conclusive warfare. The novel is at once a warning about tbe future, a satire on the present, and an ironic parody of the literary and political themes of tbe 19305. The Anschluss, , Guernica all Y 136 PART Il. THE ART and Artbur Clarke's z00 1. Tf the novel had been completed a year later and the title transposed to 1994, we would have had to wait another ten years for the momentons revaluation of Orwell's work. lt is notoriously dificule to predict the future accurately in a world that is rapidly transformed by technalogy. Who conld have imagined 1949 in 1914? How precisely can we imagine 2019 in 19842 Most of Orwell's statements about the re were not prophecies but tinie as much. as he looked forward. The portrayal ol Alrstrip One Teflects che, defeated and hopeless al air opor ondon. Britain had won the war but Hówe, “that'pérsuaded many people that there could be no lasting truce with the Communist world? Orwell failed to predict urban guerrillas, ecological problems, oil short- ages, genetic engineering, organ transplants, computers, sophisticated spy equipment, spaceships, satellites, nuclear submarines, intercontinental mis- siles and the hydrogen bomb, as well as.the dissolution of empire and the postcolonial era that followed the Second World War. England and America today bcar no significant resemblance to Oceania. Yet his very act of proph- ecy tended to induce its own fulfiliment, for readers have adopted his terms and sought his portents. In the year 2000, as surely as we are now watching for Orwellian omens, masses ol new believers will be standing on mountain tops waiting for the apocalypse at the end of the second millennium. Par Orwell did |predi t,in Nineleen Eighty- Lou three o supersrates said díat they wovld us ntional weapons) that the war sula be confined to peripheral territorics (Central America, Africa, the Middle East, and Sourh Asia) and that there would bc no invasion of the homeland of 14. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR 137 the principal powers.* The Vietnam War was a classic example of America and Russia supporting forcign armies in an alien batleground, The ruthless suppression of personal frecdor, the rigid indoctrination and the widespread elimination of hostile clements doring the cultural revolution in China, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia and the Khomeini autocracy in Iran have made Nineteen Eighty-Fonr a reality in our own time. But the horror of the Gulag Archipelago, which in 1948 had existed for nearly two decades, is far worse than anything portraycd by Orwell. Russia, like Eurasia in 1948, still is a totalitarian power opposed to the West. Tr Nineteen Fighty-Four is composed of five poorly integrated elements, Or- svoúld have artisticaly refined and perfécted them if he had not been despe te to finish the book before his death. Tle'was terminally ill when he wrote the. novel, had great difficulty completiigi tana ted to'make his epe ear drafts ol his work, but more than hall of the t Eypescript of Nineteen Ejghty-Fonr was crossed out and completely rewritten.* The five elements are (1) a conventional Orwellian novel of poverty, 8. The novel is artist ally flawed b ferent novelistic and political purpose. How, hen, do we account for the great strength of the novel, for the source of its overwhelming impact? L have argued elsewhere that Nineteen Eigbty-Four was influenced by Swift, Dostoyevsky, Zamyatin and Trotsky; was a culmination of all the characteristic belicfs and ideas expressed in Orwell's works from the De- pression Lo the Cold War; was a paradigm of the history of Europe for the previous twenty years; and expressed the political experience of an entire generation, T would now like to show that if we read Nineteen Elghty- Four 140 — PARY IL THE ART culture—television and video over books and magazines—and the corrup- tion of language by computer jargon. All these tendencies have produced words that seem Lo be written on a typewriter by a typewriter. reristic literary themes of the Thirties appear in Ninetecn self. -deceprion, Marx and Fecud, violence and war. And aspects of Orwells “TFéportage—his anatomy of Burma, France and England in the 19308 in “A Hanging,” “How the Poor Dic,” and The Road to Wigan Pier—axe incor- porated in Nineteen Eighty-Forwr to provide the documentary basis of the future world. The writers of the 19308 had intense feclings about the conventions and codes of schools and schoolboys, which were often based on their personal experiences as both teachers and pupils. The hcadmaster became the embodi- ment of social and political power, and the austerity and sadism of the school were contrasted to the civility and kindness of the home. Auden expressed this theme when he wrote: “The best reason Y have for opposing Fasci: that at school I lived in a Fascist state" Anthony West, who described his own horrible schooldays in the autobiographical novel Heritage, was the first to notice that “most of these [terrors], in Nineteen Fighty-Fonr, arc of an infantile character, and they clearly derive from the experience described in Such, Such Were the Joys. ... What he did in Nineteen Eigbty-Four was to send everybody in England to an enormous Crossgates to be as miserable as he had been.”-* Nineteen Eigbty-Four explores the complex mixture of nostalgia, fear and sel-hatred that Orwell felt when writing about his school days. By. drawing on these intense early experiences, he convincingl: “ays the psycho gi n is ons, banners nd drills all derive from school. Parsons, who sesembles a large boy, is an athletic Hearty. Winston dislikes Julia at first “because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about with her” Even Winstor's compulsivo repetition of “DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER? in his diary recalls the lines written out as punishment at school, Nineteen Figbty-Four rellects the 1930s ritual of cinema-g0ing and the , Cinema, advertisióg and propagáñida, puble issues, 14. NINETREN EIGHTY-EOLUR 141 20€s there. But a recurring image in Níneteen Eigbty-Four is Che bombing of Jewish refugees in the Mediterranean which Winston sees al the cinema on April 3, 1984. Several hundred victims are killed when a rocket bomb lalls on a crowded film theater in Stepney, East London. The obligatory Two Minutes Hate, with Goldstein as the star performer, 15 projected on a gigantic teléscreón before a hystérical anti-Semitic audience. "Winston dimly recalls an advertisoment for wine in which “a vast bottle composed of electric lights scemed to move up and down and pour its con- tents into a glass? Virtually albthe Outer Party members are swallowers of slogans: “War is Peace / Frecdom is Slavery /Ignorance is Strength.” ¡Should not it logically he “Ignorance is Wisdom”?) As in a modern political cam- paign, the head of Big Brother (whose image is an amalgara of Sralin and Kirchener) appears “on coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on ban- ners, on posters, and on the wrapping of a cigarerte packet—everywhere.” The writers of the Thirties deale with public themes. [r was a decade of economic depression throughout the world; massive unemployment and povi ent the misery of democraciés and the Fisé SE Pascióm; wars in Man- nder z lita: Ada Mayakovsky, Babel and. delta were killed during Stalin's regime. The decade of hatred between the Nazis and the Communists culminated in profound disillusionment with the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact (August 1939), which was repudiated by Germany's invasion of Russia (June 1941). This abrupt alteration of political alliances was portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Bour wheú “e becimekaswa; with ex- treme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Hastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. he Hate continued exactly as before, except tar the target had been changed" As in 1930s literature, intellectuals in Nineteen Ejghty-Fowr lie to support their cause and protect their own position, and agree.co accept and practice immoral acts. Orwell once condemned Auden for his phrase “the necessary murder.” In Nineteen Eighty-Four O'Brien asks Winston: “T£ for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child's face—are you prepared to do that?” and he unhesitatingly answers: “Yes.” In both the 19308 and in Nineteen Ejgbty-Four the ruling class betrays the principles of the revolution; and the deceivers are themselves deceived. The committed writers of the 19308 developed a new moral awareness and literary strategy to deal with the dreadful conditions of the time. They hecame socially and politically conscions and abandoned private art for 142 PART IL. THE ART public communication. They adopted a new tone and rheroric in which to express their new convictions and often embraced Left-wing or Communist ideology. The two main intellectual influences of the Thirties, Marx and Freud, are faithfully reflected in Nineteen Esghty-Four The Marxist dialec- tic, expressed in Trotsky's style, appears in the forbidden tract, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Winston embraces the Marxist belief: “Tf there was hope, it must lie in the proles.” His hope is not based on their real or theoretical virtue, but on the fact that they comprise eighty-five percent of the population and ate the only force that seems strong enough. to overthrow the Party. But the proles lack a Marxist political awareness and a desire to revolt against oppression. Orwell suggests a Freudian interpretation of Winston's dreams to depict his inner life, They concern Winston's guilt about the sacrificial death of his mothex, which foreshadows his betrayal of Julia. Winston realizes that the political hysteria stirred up by the Two Minutes Hate is an emotional outlet for “sex gone sour” And the last line of the childrew's poem, which he has been vainly trying to remembex, is supplied by the voice on the telescreen when he and Julia are arrested in their secret bedroom. The line suggests tie threat of castration after sexual pleasure: “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head!” of global wa - Gordon Comstock cagerly awaits this destruction in Keep the Aspidistra Hlyines George Bowling dreads it in Coming Up for Air. 1 genero Which “had failed The Test by being. too young to participate in the Great War, but he brilliantiy passed The Test in n Spain. Oryell (and his Gs honesty and integrity ¿hise tirough Nineteón Ligbty Ton id in the literary personae of the more openly autobiographical works of the Thirties. All his books project what Malcolm Muggeridge has called “his prolerarian fancy dress, punctilions rolling of his cigarertes, his rusty laugh and woebegone expression and kindly disposition.”* 14. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR 143 IV Orwell not onty evokes the past era of the Thirries to explain the evolution of 1948 into Nineteen Fighty-Four, but also ironically reverses the dominant political themes of the period: homosexuality, frontiers, spies, technology, Mass Observation, change of consciousness, collective action, justification of Communism and intellectual polarities. Winston affirms Orwell's own commendable heresies of the 19308: his refiisal to adopr the orthodoxy of the Left about the socialist intelligentsia in England (cridized in The Road to Wigan Pier) and aboúcrhé CommuniscParty ió Spain (condemned in Homage to Catalonia). Nineteen Eighty-Four contains two opposing strains: Orwell's trurhful sevelations about +hé horror of both Fascism" “and Col munism, and his despair about the destructión ore hopés and” “The homosexual theme—founded on adolescent love affairs in school, pottrayed as a protest against the oppressive educational system and ideal- ized in poems like Auden's “Lay your sleeping head”—becomes perversely twisted in Nineteen Eighty-Forr. Winston's intense attachment to O'Brien takes on homosexual overtones and verges on sexcrime, (When tortured, Winston freely but falsely admits he is a sexual pervert.) When he first comes to his hero's fac, “A wave of admiration, almost of worship, flowed out from Winston towards O"Brien” When O'Brien tortures him to the point of lunacy and death, “It made no difference. In some sense that went deeper than friendship, they were intimates.” And just before he faces his final degradation in Room 101, “The peculiar reverence for O”Brien, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Winstor's heart again” Like the young favorite of the Head Boy at school, Winston vacillates becween craven submission and a lust for vicarious power. O'Bricr's Trish name may have bcen inspired by the surname of Or- welPs first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, by her brother Dr. Eric Lawrence O'Shaughnessy (who had the same Christian name as Orwell) and by Erics wife, Dr. Gwen O'Shanghnessy. The name may have expressed OrwclPs fears about the power, domination and sexual demands of women, which the pas- sive Winston is scarcely able to deal with. Fileen, as closely attached to her brother as to her husband, was deeply grieved by Eric's death at Dunkirk in 1941. Both Eric and Gwen O'Shaughnessy treated Orwell for tubercu- losis in the 19308. Orwell may have transferred his antagonism from the doctors—who seemed to be rorturing him while trying to cure him during the unsnccessful trearment with streptomycin in 1948—to the authoritarian figure of O'Brien, While curing Winston of Thoughtcrime, O'Brien destroys his body exactly as the doctors had done. 146 PART (E, THE ART followed by betrayal and repression, catastrophe leads only to catastraphe, the new order is lar worse than the old. In Orwcl's novel, the “endiess catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of ci os, lying propaganda, unjust aggr > broken treaties” arc attributed to Eurasia (or Fastasia), but they actually take place in Occania. After the Second World War, the destruction of much of England, the reaffirmation of the class system and his own long illness, Orwell realized that tho totalitarian states he had writren about in his essay on James Burn- ham had come into permanent existence, The ideas of the 19308 had led to the chaos of postwar Europe and his hopes had been destroyed. Orwell's disillasionment and disease help to account for the political ideas and the artistic flaws of the novel. Nineteen Eighty-Fowris at once a warning about the future, a satire on the present and an ironic parody of the literary and political themes of the Thirties. The past, as a theoretical concept and a historical reality, is crucial to the meaning of the novel. “The best books, [Winston] perceived, are those thar tell you what you know already.” ME. á : | FIFTEEN MISERIES AND SPLENDORS OF SCHOLARSHIP Bernard Crick and Peter Davison were buth at the Library of Congress conference, and their personalities accurately reflected their work. My third essay on Nineteen Fighty-Four contrasted Crick's poorly an- notated and factually inaccurate edition of the novel witb Davisor's masterful facsimile edition (both 1984). Crick was completely ot * of bis depth as a literary crític and there was nothing original in bis overlong introduction, written in bis typically turgid style. Davisow's work revealed Orwell's working methods and enabled readers to see tbe genesis of the novel, Wyndham Lewis's prescient political study, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), which would have been a brilliant title for Orwell's novel, begins with simi- lar premises but arrives at quite different conclusions. Written a few years after the Russian Revolution and the Fascist coup in Italy, Lewis's book, like Orwell's, combines satire, political theory and prophecy. Lewis (who lived in Canada during World War IL taught at Assumption College and wrote his greatest novel, Self Condemued, about 'Loronto) sees the postwar world divided between the democratic and dictatorial forms of government: “The principal conflict to-day, then, is between the democratic and tiberal principle on the one side... and on the other the principle of dictatorship of which Lenin was the protagonist and first great theorist” Because the masses are manipulated by the media—*The contemporary Public [is] corrupted and degraded into semi-imbecility by the operation of this terrible canon ef press and publicity technique”—Lewis rejects force as a passing and precarious thing and cynically insists that thought control, gerting “inside a person's mind and changing his very personality, is the cffectiye way of reducing him. and making him yours.” 
